I don't have much time left, but I have to go to one other place and I can't
believe it's taken this long. We've gone this far into the program and
nobody's talked about crypto. You and I have had a long running
conversation about crypto currencies, and every time you were critical of
crypto, remember the time he described it as a jihadist call against the
dollar? You were pilloried, pilloried by the
crypto faithful. And of course, when Citadel started a
crypto trading business, they celebrated your supposed capitulation.
So that's the scene setter for the question, folks.
What I want to know from you, Ken, is what do you make of the spectacular
collapse of Sam Banks and Freed's FTSE ex?
Well, okay. So big picture.
The crypto market cap today is a fraction what it was.
We first started talking about it. So cryptos not.
It was three trillion and now it's well under a billion.
It's like a hundred billion of which a big part of that stable coins, right?
So you really move back into world of bitcoin and the theorem is the two
dominant crypto currencies, both of which actually happen to be CFTC
regulated. Look, RTX is one of these absolute
travesties in the history of financial markets.
I mean, people will lose billions of dollars collectively.
People are going to lose billions of dollars.
And that undermines trust in all financial markets.
It was the fundamental problem that it was a business built on cryptocurrency
to begin with or that it was a business that wasn't adequately regulated or that
it was a business that the venture capital and other investors who put
money into RTX didn't didn't adequately. You know, diligence.
What's the fundamental problem? Well, I think the fundamental is it's
just fraud. So.
So first of it's a really big choice of words to use.
And I can't go there at this point in time.
But we do know is the balance sheet shows a giant black hole.
And there's no doubt that customer assets were used to make investment
decisions. In favor of FTSE DAX shareholders, which
didn't work at the expense of the customers.
That's not permitted in American broker dealers.
You can't just use your customer assets to go engage in proprietary trading.
That's a that's a huge no, no, it's a no no in most parts of the world.
At most parts of the world. And it's a good.
No, no, to be clear, too. All right.
So RTX, you know, billions of dollars have been lost here.
The confidence, though, of a generation in financial markets has also been
shaken. That's really awful because the 20 some
year olds to 40 year olds who are so engaged in crypto.
They've got to save for their retirement.
And if they don't believe or trust in financial markets, this is a huge
problem. They need to own stocks.
They need to own corporate debt. They need to partake in our global
capital markets. Now, with with FTSE, there are there are
a few points here that we should talk about.
The turf war by American regulators has got to end.
It's just preposterous that. Without naming the agencies, they all
dance around who owns what and who. And the bottom line is American
investors have really gotten hurt here to the tune of hundreds of billions of
dollars in decline in market cap and crypto over the last two years.
I mean, that that really strikes at the entire core essence of what's investor
protection all about. The second is that RTX.
Crosses into it into a zone that that all of us are worried about, you know,
on the balance sheet of RTX line called Trump Lose.
And Sam was the second biggest donor to Democratic candidates.
I'm going to leave it to everybody else to draw their own conclusions about what
you're saying here, right.
Those are those are really, really ugly facts.
When you see a fraud of this magnitude having played out and you find no
regulators were there to prevent it. That's a really, really tough story.